


on your way up to the light

by ryfkah



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Barricades, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 06:42:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryfkah/pseuds/ryfkah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eponine throws a note at an old man.  She doesn't anticipate the consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on your way up to the light

Jean Valjean was sitting alone on an embankment of the Champ de Mars, thinking of how to procure passports to England. The atmosphere of Paris grew dangerous; there had been strange incidents in the garden, and he was uneasy and anxious; still, the urgency did not seem immediate, there was a little time to work out how to proceed. He had reached this point in his considerations when a paper fell on his head. He took it, unfolded it, and read on it, in large letters written with a pencil: MOVE OUT. 

When he jumped up, heart thudding, he caught side of someone – larger than a child, smaller than a man, dressed in undistinguished dirt-colors – who jumped over the parapet and slid into the gully of the Champ de Mars on the other side.

Jean Valjean was more used to being the pursued than the pursuer. He did not have the terrier-instinct, to chase where someone ran. All the same, a cornered dog will snap. He was tired of being hounded, tired of mysteries and warnings, of life sending him where it would without his consent; jumping to his feet, without thought, he gave chase. 

The person ahead was slim and quick, but Valjean was quick, too, for a man of his age. Then, too, the grass of the Champ de Mars had been softened and mired with mud from the rains of the night before. Valjean was sure of foot, his prey was not; down the stranger went, and in a blink Valjean, dropping to his knees, had reached out and clamped a muddy wrist.

The face that glared up at him was all bones and eyes – a gamin, he thought, and then, a beat later, a girl. “Child,” he demanded, not ungently, “who paid you to deliver this?” 

“Nobody,” spat the girl. She struggled, and tried to pull away, but his grip was strong.

“Why, then?”

“I don't like you.”

“I've never seen your face before,” said Valjean. “If I've wronged you somehow . . .” He paused; the girl had stopped trying to pull away, and her shoulders were shaking with what he realized, a moment later, was laughter. “Am I wrong?”

“We were nothing to a man like you,” said the girl, laughing. “My father made you in an instant, but why should you recognize us? We were nothing to a man like you, and now we're less than that.” 

Valjean stilled. He didn't recognize her in the least. There was nothing familiar about her. But Thenardier, he knew, had been prowling the neighborhood; Thenardier, who hated him, because Thenardier was the kind of man who hated the world. 

There had been two children, hadn't there? Two well-dressed little girls, with dolls they wouldn't share. If this was Thenardier's daughter – as it must be Thenardier's daughter – then all was explained. 

Or was it, after all? Thenardier wished, surely, to rob him, denounce him or murder him, or all three at once, if such a thing was possible. The last thing Thenardier would want to do was fright the quarry.

“I think I know your father,” he said, slowly. “I know his grudge, but what's yours?”

“I told you. I don't like you.”

“You know me; if you dislike me so much, lead your father to me, and he'll take care of the business.”

“My father, my father!” snapped the girl. “I'm sick of him. He irritates me almost as much as you do. He takes, you give, and none of it's the least use to me. You come like a bleeding-heart angel and rescue a little girl from misery, very well, then you leave and you leave misery behind you, very well, it's of no consequence to you. You've done your deed of charity, you've raised up your girl. And now your girl has everything, and me nothing, and why should that be, Monsieur Bleeding-Heart?” 

Valjean had no answer to this. It was a question he had asked himself, in a different time, but over the years he had forgotten it; 'why' did so little good, and 'how' did so much more. 

And here, too, he reminded himself, this was how he should think of it – not why, but how, how to help her? She came from an evil place, and there was no spark of light in her to be easily seen. He did not like her, and was nervous of the danger she represented. Still, she was in misery. “You've more than nothing, child,” he said. 

He released her wrist, but she seemed not to notice. She laughed again, a laugh he knew from the bagne; it scorned the world, as her father hated it. “If I do, it's news to me!” 

“There's your life.”

“As to that,” said the girl, “I rate it how you'd rate the flea that crawls into your hair. It itches and squirms. You think, someday soon, the day will come when I can crush it.”

She shoved herself to her feet, tested her ankle; then she was off and running again. In another moment, she'd be gone beyond recall. 

“Wait!” Valjean called, and, reaching for his purse, threw it to the ground. It fell with the thunk of metal on metal, and the girl's head jolted around. He could not remember in the slightest what her name might be. “This is for you,” he said, the words clumsy in his mouth, as they always were. It could not make up for a life, but very little could; it would not conciliate her to him, and might only enrage her further; but there was nothing more he could do. 

He didn't wait to see if she took it, but turned and walked away, back the way he had come. 

 

She'd almost left the purse. She'd stood there, and she'd thought, he thinks to buy me, but I won't take it; but then someone else had approached, and in the flash of an eye she'd snapped it up. She was too hungry, and to let someone else have it would be too much of a waste.

It jangled now in her shirt; to carry it outside would be an invitation for someone else to pluck it. Overwhelmed to the luxury of decision, she lingered along a street full of bakeries, unable to choose between them where to spend her windfall, when she saw a familiar child pulling a face at a barber across the way. 

“Hey!” she shouted, seeing him about to vanish back into the crowd. “Hey!” She wouldn't share her windfall with her father or her mother, not them, but her brother hadn't done her any harm lately. “Gavroche! Here, we'll eat today!”

A few minutes later they were settled next to each other on the pavement in front of a bakery, ignoring the glares of the owner. She thought they'd stolen the money, it was clear, but she wouldn't call the police down on them, not with weapons stockpiled in the basement. Gavroche had picked the place, and he knew these sorts of things. The child fancied himself a revolutionary. 

“Where'd you come by the blunt?” he asked her now, through a mouthful of brioche.

“Some old do-good,” said Eponine, carelessly. You never knew what Gavroche might take it in his head to drop to someone. “Didn't he read me a moral for it!”

“I didn't think you'd have stood there for it.”

Eponine shrugged. 

Gavroche let it pass. He was always happy to fill a silence, anyway. “Well, the old fellows these days are something!” he remarked, in the knowing way he had that he thought made him sound older. Half the time it did the opposite; this was one of them, and Eponine regarded him with a sudden rush of affection. “'Parnasse tried to pluck one the other day and got nothing but a face full of dirt and a lecture for his troubles – well, a lecture and a half, a real monologue! The old veteran held him down with one hand and prophesied that in ten years he'd be broken, bent, toothless, horrible, white-haired and all. _'Parnasse!_ ” He laughed, and brioche crumbs flew out of his mouth. “Let me give that sauce to dandies when I've got my white beard, that's all I ask!”

“So then?” asked Eponine. It didn't matter much to her if Montparnasse was in prison now, but she'd like to know it.

“Oh, well, after dropping him, the fellow turned around and left him his purse with the lecture after all. That was wrong; it was such a scene the veteran should have been paid for it, not the other way around. But 'Parnasse didn't keep it long, so all's well.” 

He leaned back and crossed his arms behind his head, looking pleased enough with himself to make it clear enough where the purse had gone. “Wretch!” said Eponine, pleased as well. Montparnasse could use all the taking down anybody was willing to give him. “If you're in the funds too, you shouldn't've let me pay.”

“Not a bit of it,” confessed Gavroche, cheerfully. “I ran into an octegenarian who seemed like he should be lucky.” 

The blackness of Eponine's mood descended upon her again with this confidence. “Throwing away good cash just any old how! Where did you learn to be such a fool?” 

“Well, he was a funny old man too,” said Gavroche, unperturbed, “and one good old man deserves another.” 

Eponine scowled down at her own loaf, pressing a sharp crumb between her fingers. “And you and me are siblings!” she muttered. “You're enough to make me doubt my mother.” It wasn't fair; if he could have less than her and be so good, there was nothing for her to think except that she was a natural devil. 

“Ah now, even you're disowning me!” 

He pulled a face at her, and she laughed; she might be all bitterness inside, but that never kept her from laughing. “As if it mattered to you! You've all but changed your name to Desmoulins anyhow.”

“Desmoulins?” said Gavroche, scornfully, and, cramming the last of the brioche in his mouth, jumped to his feet. He puffed out his skinny chest to pigeon-shape and put his hands on his hips. “Danton!”

“You dream!” 

Gavroche made a show of ignoring her as he dusted off his front. “Well,” he announced, majestically, “I'm off. Thanks for the grub, Citizen, you'll be remembered for it when the people have their day.” 

Eponine flipped him a coin. “Don't waste that,” she warned, as he caught it deftly. “I'll feed you, not half the brats in Paris. Are you going to the play-house?”

“There's a better play coming on,” said Gavroche. “This poor old country's going to clear out the rot in her nose. The great sneeze is coming, no handkerchiefs wanted!” He gave her a jaunty wave and disappeared into the crowd. 

“Well,” said Eponine, as he left, “so he's keeping himself busy!” She ought to do the same, but now her stomach was full and she couldn't remember anything else she had to do. She thought to herself that perhaps she would go water that old man's Mabeuf's garden again; it was the sort of thing a good girl might do on a whim, and that Monsieur Marius would like. 

But the following thought came fast on the heels of the first: certainly he would like it, from a well-dressed girl with a sweet face and soft hands. It would be different with her. On some people, goodness was like the clumsy dance a bear did in the street; you couldn't believe it natural, and wondered about the whip behind it. 

She pushed herself abruptly to her feet. Perhaps she would go to walk by the river – though it wouldn't look any less cold today than it had the day before, she knew, and she would only turn away, a coward again. Or perhaps she would go back to the Rue Plumet. There was little enough chance that anything had changed, but in some small things, Eponine still had hope. 

 

The note had done more than she supposed. Valjean had decided that he no longer had the luxury of time. The Thenardier girl knew where he lived; if she hadn't told her father today, that was no guarantee she wouldn't tomorrow. He got Cosette to the Rue de l'Homme-Armee with as much haste as possible; she protested, looked sad and anxious, ran out again and again for 'one last look' at the garden in the Rue Plumet, but this was only the suddenness, he thought, and she would be well tomorrow. 

Then he saw the message on the blotter, the remnants of a note she had written to Marius, and all of Cosette's behavior was suddenly understood. 

He could not comprehend the Thenardier girl's motives, but at least he knew who she was, now. She wouldn't call the police, not her. There was a little time. His mind in turmoil, he hastened back to the house on the Rue Plumet – not knowing if he would find Cosette's Luxembourg romantic there, nor even, if he did, what he would say. Scoundrel, how dare you dream of robbing me of my child? Come, do not cry, my daughter is well? Give up all hope, foolish boy, and never come back? Or perhaps he would say nothing at all, and merely watch the boy as his face turned pale and he ran from an encounter with a looming figure in the dark. There would be some satisfaction in that. 

Any of these things were possible. He knew only that he had to go. 

And yet, when he heard a voice raised from the alley that led to the garden, he found he could not go on, not yet. A convict knows how to be still as few others do; he pressed himself against the wall, and waited. 

“Monsieur Marius! Is that you?”

With some startlement, he recognized the voice. It had been much on his mind, but he had not expected to hear it just now.

“Yes,” came a faint response. 

“Monsieur Marius,” cried the Thenardier girl, “your friends are expecting you at the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie.” It was a simple sentence, and yet there was something triumphant about it, and something terrible. Then he heard footsteps, running towards him. The Thenardier girl fled around the corner, and past him. For the second time, he followed her.

Down several twisting streets they ran; she must have heard his footsteps pelting along behind her, but she waited until they were well away from the house before she whirled around. “If it's the cash you want, you can take –”

She broke off, as she recognized him. “It's you!”

He stood silent.

“I thought you were another robber,” she said. There was a wild kind of joy in her eyes; she moved restlessly and spoke rapidly. She was happy, and frightening in her happiness. “Well, you did move away! That's good – I'm glad. I thank you for it. I was rude last time, wasn't I? Well, it doesn't matter! You can move back soon, if you like – tomorrow, if you like. I haven't told my father. But I'm glad you were gone today! All is going to be well. What did you want with me?”

Thinking was difficult, past the fear of losing Cosette. She watched him, head tilted, sparrow-bright, as he tried to put it all together. She had told the boy to go to the barricade, and said it wouldn't matter if he and Cosette moved back tomorrow.

“What did you want with me?” the girl repeated, a little impatiently. “I'll tell you whatever you like, you've done me well, but I'm in a hurry, I want to get there before him – oh!” She pulled out a purse, which he recognized, after a blank moment, as his own, and threw it back to him. He caught it automatically. “You may as well take this back,” she said. “I'd give it to my brother or my sister, but I won't see them.”

Finally, the words came. “You mean to die,” he said. His voice sounded thick and distorted in his own ears – a criminal's voice. “You mean to die, and you mean for him to die.” 

The girl took a step back. Was she frightened of him? Her face changed; a little of the joy dropped out of it. “Well, what of it? It's no concern of yours, Monsieur Bleeding-Heart! Your life and your girl's will go on just as they have, so let us die!”

For saying out loud what he had been thinking in the darkest part of his heart, he wanted to strike her. It made everything too clear. There was no avoiding, now, what had to be done.

He turned, without a word, and bolted in the direction of the Rue de la Chanverie. 

 

“Hey!” Eponine shouted. “Where are you running to!” But he didn't answer, and she gave it up and simply ran. It was hard enough to keep up, and her breath was short enough already. How did a man so old come to be so fast?

She didn't know why she was running after him. He was going the direction she had meant to go, but she would have followed even if he had fled the opposite way. It was instinct that set her to chase him – instinct, and the terrible look that had been on his face as he turned. There had been something almost murderous about him in that moment. Her soul had recognized it, and shivered, as one devil calling to another.

Wherever he went, wearing that look, and whatever he was going to do, she had to know it. If she knew it, she would know something about herself, when she had thought there was nothing more to know. 

Through the narrowing streets they ran, the man and the girl following behind him as if tethered. The streets were empty, then crowded, then eerily empty again. From time to time the harsh retort of a shot rang out, and was answered. The man moved through it all as if in a trance. When there were crowds, they melted out of his way; Eponine was not so fortunate. She used her knees and elbows, and kept him ferociously in view. When the streets were empty, the sound of her footsteps skittered in the spaces between his long strides. They passed dreamlike through Paris, and, dreamlike, Eponine suddenly realized that they had found their way to the Rue Mondetour, behind the Rue de la Chanvrerie. It was where she had been planning to go, but she had not noted the way. 

The barricade was ahead of them. There they were, and there, sitting on a post, was Monsieur Marius. His face looked to her more beautiful than ever; it was tracked with tears. 

A bolt went through Eponine's heart, but she said to herself, fiercely, after today, he will weep no more, and neither will I.

The old man came to stand straight in front of Monsieur Marius. Eponine trailed behind him. Monsieur Marius's eyes were glazed, he was so deep in thought that he seemed to see nothing. Of course; he never had seen her, why should he start now? 

“Boy,” said the old man. His voice was the same as it had been when he spoke to her before – strange, low, murderous, with nothing kind in it. “Why are you here?” 

Marius started, and stared. He turned white. “You – you are –”

“Why,” repeated the man, “are you here? Are these your friends? Do you believe in their cause? Why are you not with them?”

Marius swallowed, and stood a little straighter, and Eponine felt her heart swell, too, to see him proud and defiant. “If you ask me if I am one of them, I am not. Their cause is not mine. But my friends are in there, and my life is no use to me anymore – so I am as you see. I will join them now.

The old man made an incoherent sound, and seized Marius' shoulder. His face was contorted – it was hate, it was; she knew it well; she'd felt her own face contort the same way as she watched the girl Cosette laugh in the garden, the girl who had everything. 

“Monsieur, what can this mean?” exclaimed the bewildered Marius.

“To throw away your life –”

Whatever he had been going to say was interrupted by the shout of a child's voice in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, beyond. “Look out!” it cried, and Eponine started.

“That child,” she said, blankly, as gunfire rang in her ears, “is my brother.” 

She should have expected his presence here, though he would certainly not be expecting hers. Of course he would not know the reason why she had come. If he was here, it was to live.

But this was a barricade, and the only thing to be found here was death. 

If he died after she did, would it matter? She wouldn't be there to miss him. 

She became aware that both men were staring at her, as if seeing her for the first time. The old man reached out a hand, as if to check her, but she wrenched away and fled down into the Rue de la Chanvrerie. Monsieur Marius would follow, or he wouldn't. She had chosen her fate, anyway. 

Now she was truly inside the barricade, all was confusion. Some people were running, and some shouting. Some were very clearly dead. Her gaze fell upon the smallest figure, defiantly facing up against a giant with a bayonet, and she ran towards him. She had no weapon; she had not thought she would need one. 

She hauled Gavroche out of the way just as the bayonet descended. A moment later, a shot rang out, and the giant tumbled. “Hey, you,” said Gavroche, indignant at being pulled about like a child, “settle your own fights!” But Eponine had already turned around, to see where the shot had come from; it would have been too late for Gavroche alone, but it had saved them nonetheless. The answer, it turned out, was Monsieur Marius. He had come into the barricade after all. 

The worse for him; a soldier was taking aim, and in another moment the melancholies of Monsieur Marius Pontmercy would be ended for good. It was what she had wanted, and yet it seemed it was not what she wanted after all – she didn't know, everything was in confusion, she ran towards the soldier but it was not possible that she should reach him in time – 

She saw another figure, a massive figure with white hair, rear up out of the confusion and barrel into the soldier's side. The gun went off. Monsieur Marius cried out, and both Eponine and the old man – for it was he who had attempted to send the soldier's gun off-course – ran towards him. 

Around them, the battle raged. She was only dimly aware of it. Marius was leaning against a wall, his upper arm and shoulder soaked in blood. He blinked down, dazed, as if surprised to find the wound there. 

The old man was on Marius' other side, binding his arm with a handkerchief. He looked at her, and said, “He need not die from this, but if he stays, he will.”

Eponine's mouth opened, and then shut again. 

“I will do what I can for your brother, to see that he comes through this.” The old man's voice was harsh and weary. “But you – you must bring this one home to my daughter, while the way out is still open.”

She wanted to shout at him that she would do no such thing. She had chosen her death, her death alongside Marius, and the thought of it had made her happier and more relieved than anything had done in a long time. She had chosen death for Marius, too. She could choose these things again. The chance wasn't gone. 

Marius, meanwhile, was staring at the old man with a painful intensity through the thicket of his eyelashes. “But what can this mean?” he murmured, for the second time, and then, “Cosette . . .”

The old man flinched, and that look came over his face again, the one Eponine had recognized. She could not have mistaken it. 

“All right!” she snarled, sounding like an animal, and knowing it. It hurt beyond imagining; she wanted to spit in the face of this old man who had taken the rightness of her death away from her. She went to Marius and placed his arm around her shoulders; he barely noticed. “Come, Monsieur Marius,” she said, bitterly. “Your life is waiting for you, your dreams as well, so come along with me.”

They stumbled back into the Rue Mondetour. The old man stood in front of them, and nobody saw them go. 

It wasn't until they were back into the street that it occurred to Eponine to wonder why he had sent her home with Marius instead of simply carrying him home himself. It was Marius he had come for. Why had he stayed? 

 

(There was a story Eponine didn't know. If she had, she might have understood. It went like this: once there was a man who was bound by his past. He ran into a burning building to save a stranger's children. He did this because he had nothing to lose. In the fire, his past burned away; he was able to achieve grace.) 

 

It wasn't an easy thing to get a half-fainting man through the streets without being stopped by the authorities. But any street child knew the ways to go, if you didn't want to be noticed, and soon enough they stood in front of the apartment in the Rue de l'Homme-Arme. 

The door opened a crack, and a woman peered warily through. After a horrible moment in which she desperately wondered if she could have gotten the address wrong, Eponine recognized the stammering servant who lived with the girl and the old man. She had only ever glimpsed her once or twice, in her long vigils at the Rue Plumet. 

“Please –” She hastily wedged her foot in the door, just in case the old woman should take it in her mind to shut it. “Call for Cosette, and hurry!”

“Cosette?” mumbled Marius, and closed his eyes, at the same time as the old woman exclaimed, “C-C-Cosette? Mademoiselle Fauchelevant, you mean!”

Eponine wanted to scream. Hadn't she had enough, without being looked down upon by servant-women to boot? “There's no time for this! Just fetch her!” 

Mercifully, Cosette appeared then – and Eponine had no time to wonder at the strangeness of thinking of the girl's arrival as merciful. “What is it?” she asked, appearing behind her in the door, and then gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. “Marius!”

“He's wounded,” Eponine said gruffly, as the door flew open. “From the barricades.” She hauled Marius forward. She wanted to simply shove him straight into Cosette's arms – it was where he wanted to be anyway – but Cosette seemed so delicate, as if she might simply sink to the floor under the weight. “Help me!” she demanded, instead. “Show me where to take him.”

Cosette stepped forward hastily to assist, pulling Marius' other arm over her shoulder. She did not sink. “We'll take him to my father's room. Toussaint – shut the door behind us, quick, before any police pass by! No, wait – no, don't shut the door, go for the doctor! With all speed!”

Together, the two girls got Marius onto the bed. Cosette knelt by his side, stroking his hair back from his brow. “The bandage,” she murmured, “it's soaked through, perhaps it ought to be changed? But if the doctor comes, perhaps he should –”

Eponine began to back away, silently, but before she could make it through the door, Cosette jumped to her feet and grabbed Eponine by the hand. “Oh – I will go wild! Please, you must tell me how this has come to be!”

Cosette's hand was very soft. If she had ever had chilblains from the cold – and Eponine knew she had, once – they had healed up a long time ago. Eponine wrenched her own hand away. Clenching rough fingers in rough palms, she muttered, “He was at the barricade, I told you. He was injured there. But you'll want to tell the doctor he was just passing by, and was caught in the crossfire, or they'll call the cops on him.”

“That's my father's handkerchief binding his wound,” said Cosette, and made a hiccuping noise that was half-laugh, half-sob. “It was a handkerchief like that – but a barricade! How would Papa come to be at a barricade?” A thought suddenly occurring to her, she reached out again, clutching Eponine by the shoulder. “Oh – but don't tell me he is dead! No, but tell me, tell me the truth – is he dead?”

“He's alive. Or he was, the last I saw him.” She didn't to be there, but she didn't know how to break away. “He sent me home with your – with Monsieur Pontmercy. The fighting was bad. What will happen, I can't say.”

“But why?” Cosette whirled away, abruptly, and went to kneel by Marius again. “He left without saying a word to me,” she said, over her shoulder. “How is it that I don't know these things? Those I love most, and I don't know – why they fight in the streets, why they build barricades, I don't know anything! Do you think we ought to wash him? It can't hurt to wash away the blood. I could go to the pantry, we keep a bucket there, I could bring a basin of water and wash him, if you'll stay –”

It was unfair – it was cruelly unfair, that there could be anybody in this world who didn't know the things Eponine knew. “You're better not knowing,” she found herself saying. 

“What?”

“Why they build barricades. Why they fight in the streets. Why anything. You're very well as you are, Lark.” 

Cosette looked up at the use of the name, her face very still. Eponine turned away. She could imagine what her own face looked like, and she didn't want Cosette to see it. “The pantry's down that hall, you said? I'll go.”

She came back with the water a minute or two later. Cosette looked up as she came in, and there was a kind of recognition in her eyes that there hadn't been before. “You're the one, aren't you?” 

Eponine waited for it to come, the memory of their childhood; she didn't know what she'd say. But Cosette said, “You were the boy – the person – who came by the gate, before we moved. The one I gave the message to take to Marius.”

“Ah,” said Eponine. “Yes.” She handed Cosette the basin and crossed her arms in front of her. “I didn't give it to him.”

Cosette took the basin and dipped a bit of cloth in it.

Eponine found she wanted more of a reaction than this. She elaborated, as Cosette bent back over Marius: “I didn't give it to him, so he would go to the barricade, and he went. Your father learned of it, that's why he went. Monsieur Marius being injured, that's me. If your father ends up shot, that's me too. So now that's something you know.” 

In a moment, she thought, with bitter satisfaction, Cosette's face would twist with the same ugliness she felt in her own. In a moment, Cosette would scream, and chase her out. 

A moment passed in silence, and then another. Finally Cosette asked, low, without raising her eyes, “Will you wait with me, until my father comes home?”

Without her consent, Eponine's voice answered, “Yes.” 

The next morning, the old man came back. He was covered in the slime of the sewer. It was to Eponine he spoke first. “The barricade has fallen,” he said; he sounded weary to death. “Your brother is at the hospital; I have paid for his care. There is some chance he will live. Not a very great chance. I am sorry.”

Eponine stared at him. Whatever his own reasons for staying behind, she had never thought that he really meant to bring Gavroche from the barricade; why would he? It would have been more than anyone had ever done for her or for him since they were born . 

“Will you go to see him now?”

Eponine turned away. She had no desire to see the child's broken body. “Dead or alive,” she said roughly, “he'll do better without me.” 

The doctor had come to Marius, the old man had returned to his girl; there was no reason to stay here. Before either of them could stop her, she slipped out the door and into the street. 

 

On his long journey through the sewers, carrying a child, Valjean had met a man.

“Not much meat to pluck on a bird like that!” the man had remarked, and Valjean had recognized Thenardier.

He had not wanted to speak to him; all the same, there were rights that could not be argued with. “The boy is not dead,” Valjean had said, and brought him around in front of him, wiping the mud off his face so that it could be clearly seen under Thenardier's lantern. “Will you look at him? I don't know him, but you may.”

“You think there's a reward in it?” Thenardier had squinted down at his son, and then straightened, with an indifferent shrug. “Worse luck for you! I know the child well, you'll get nothing for him.”

There were men like this. Some injustices of the world had simply this fact at their root: that there were men like this. Valjean had remembered, then, what Thenardier's daughter had said to him when he caught her the first time. There was nothing he could have done all those years ago; his duty and his vow had been to Fantine; still, he must not forget. It had been clear then what Thenardier was. And, seeing him clearly, Valjean had left children behind, to grow up in Thenardier's shadow, in the dark. 

After the sewers came Javert, and all the rest of the long strangeness of that morning. He came home; Cosette wept to see him; Thenardier's daughter left, and was not seen again. 

Marius told them later that her name was Eponine, and that he had lived next door to her, but had known her only a little. When he spoke of her, he sounded as bewildered as he had at the barricade. 

Days passed, and then weeks. Marius mended. Javert died. Thenardier's son lingered, and did neither. Marius' grandfather reconciled to the couple. A wedding was planned. Valjean faded more and more into the background, like old and cracking wallpaper, and quietly made his own painful plans. 

On the day after Cosette's wedding, the day he confessed all to Marius, he came back to the Rue de l'Homme-Armee and found Eponine Thenardier sitting on the front steps.

“Your girl's married now,” she announced, by way of greeting. “I won't congratulate you. You're the loser, as much as I am. You can't hide it from me.”

There was nothing he could think of to say to that. Eponine didn't stand, so, after a moment, Valjean came to the steps and sat down beside her. 

“It was better I didn't come until after they were married. It was better I stayed away. I shouldn't have come at all,” she said, “but I had to know something. Look! You knew very well what I meant to do.”

He inclined his head. 

“But then, why did you trust Monsieur Marius to me? I could have done anything. There were other barricades.”

Valjean shrugged. It seemed she was destined never to ask a question he could answer.

Eponine glared at him. “I would think you meant him to die, but that can't be. You might have died that night yourself, and you'd never have left your girl alone, not you! So you knew I would bring him home – and what I've want to know is, how? I've got to know how you knew it!”

She sat there, waiting for his answer, fists clenched in her lap – thin and bitter and sharp, inviting trust no more than a knife, affection no more than a thornbush. 

Cosette had invited affection from the moment Valjean saw her. He had fallen into loving her as naturally as opening his mouth to let in air after a long time holding his breath. 

Cosette had Marius now, and she would have more, a greater and a brighter life than he could give her. Knowing this, the easy thing would be to pull away from everything, to retreat into himself and take the path to the end, and to rest. 

But the easy path had been taken from him long ago. There was still more he could do, and so he must.

“Where are you living now?” he asked, abruptly. “Are you with your father?”

“With him?” Eponine spat onto the ground. “Not if you paid me. I'm here and there, that's all.”

“You know this apartment. Cosette had a room here; she won't need it any longer. It's yours.”

_“What?”_

“It's yours,” Valjean repeated. 

“You don't even know my name!”

“I do; it's Eponine Thenardier.” Reaching into his pocket, he found a key, and held it out to her. 

She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes wide and shocked; then they narrowed, and she looked familiar again. “What's the catch, Monsieur Bleeding-Heart? What do you want from me?”

“While you live here, you'll eat, you'll have shelter. You won't harm anyone. You won't harm yourself. Other than that, you may do as you please.”

“You don't ask much!” said Eponine, sourly. She brooded for a moment, frowning down at her hands, and he continued to hold out the key. “Look here,” she said, finally. “Here's another thing I've got to know. Your girl, it's easy to understand her, she doesn't know how to hate. You raised her that way, and I thought you were like that too, but that's not it. I know what you are now; you're like me.” 

He nodded. There was no denying it; she'd seen his face as clearly as he'd seen hers.

“So what makes you so _good_ , Monsieur?” She twisted the word like a curse. “What makes you do things like this? Who's holding your whip?”

He found, to his surprise, that he could answer this question; and, moreover, that he wanted to. “I used to think it was a bishop,” he said. “Then for a long time I thought it was God. But now I think it is only myself. Does that help you understand?”

“No,” said Eponine; it was half a shout. “I don't understand anything!” 

“You understood enough to bring Marius home,” said Valjean. 

Then he placed the spare key carefully beside her, and stood, and went up the rest of the stairs. He used his own key to open the front door, and as he stepped inside, he heard Eponine's footsteps, starting up the stairs behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song [Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1](http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107859439424/). Thanks to genarti for the beta!


End file.
